Soundscape

One Sheet:

The music of Dary John Mizelle has for too long been underground. Mizelle's roots are many, and have served him well in forging his own voice. In the western composer in him, there are shades of Bartok, Messiaen, and Xenakis. His works are designed with a careful sale of macro- and micro-structure, with large-scale and internal rhythms derived from eastern music and American jazz, and with a mathematical exactitude and concern for detail. Yet within such careful architecture, Mizelle often gives his performers room to move about or improvise, and to establish their own sense of space and time. Mizelle takes care to see that the complexity and structure of his music mirrors the complexity and structure of nature: elegance of design co-exists with fortuity.

Reviews:

FANFARE

Mizelle's imaginative use of timbre sustains [the listener's] interest...the sound is excellent. - John Story

NEW YORK TIMES

A shrewd and imaginative manipulator of sound. - Bernard Holland

VILLAGE VOICE

An heir to the experimental, spiritual tradition of Ives and Cage. - Kyle Gann

"Soundscape" is like a percussion thesaurus. The whole record is quite brilliant. - Lukas Foss